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October 25, 2011

Warning: Inner conservative emerges!

I'm on record as being extremely skeptical about arguments in favor of loosening restrictions on faculty-student relationships. This post at IHE is certainly not the One True Argument that's going to change my mind. In particular, I pulled up in a screeching halt when the author invoked Tracy Flick, the scheming high schooler from the novel and film Election:

This example, by switching the usual trope of established, pompous male teacher preying on vulnerable female students who become ruined by the affair when the professor’s desire turns, offers us space to wonder what else might be possible in these kinds of relationships. Might students hold power in erotic or romantic relationships with teachers? Might teachers be thought of as human in their desires? It's tricky to think about Tracy Flick, since she's in high school, legally underage, and, therefore, legally unable to consent to a sexual relationship with any man or woman of her teacher’s age. I believe, however, that her own description of this relationship challenges commonly held beliefs about what can and does happen in the spaces between teachers and students.

The sleight-of-hand here baffles me. The example starts off as a "trope," then slides into "her own description of this relationship"--even though Tracy is a character (by a male author, at that) who doesn't have "her own description" of anything. We'll leave to one side the dancing around the underage sex business, as well as the purported originality of Tracy's "challenge." (The predatory young woman who seduces the professor/teacher, then wrecks his career, is an old trope, not a new one.) Fictional characters have the reactions their authors want them to have; we're not discussing real-world psychologies or consequences here.

Comments

Very much agreed.

Part of the problem, I think, is the slow shift in the article from talking about sexual harassment as involving "the unfair application of power used by someone against another" to treating it as only actually occurring when someone feels that they are relatively powerless (if it even occurs then), to treating it as only occurring when someone is described as feeling powerless: it ends up being all description all the way down. Even the Gallop case, the one real-life case considered, is treated entirely in terms of the way it is described by Gallop herself. I suppose if real life is treated as all description, it's not too big a leap to shift to fiction, which is all description, too.

But in full disclosure, I have to say that Gallop's book, besides arguing for what I think is a ludicrously crude and simplistic account of sexual harassment (without any regard to the 'harassment' part or even longstanding worries about conflating sexual harassment with sexual discrimination), seems to me one long and thoroughly nauseating bit of self-aggrandizement and self-congratulation in which she attempts to avoid criticism by shoving feminism into the path of the bullet. So the author of the post started entirely on the wrong set of points to gain any sympathy from me.

I think it's hard for people who haven't been harassed (i.e., who haven't been the unwilling object of such action) to understand fully how unbelievably destructive it is, or to understand how suddenly the lines of agency and capacity to act or even to will something change in such situations. No one who'd ever experienced that would argue that the rules should change, the erotic quality of many such relationships notwithstanding.

Someone is definitely confused, even within the terms of the movie. The fictional Tracy Flick was the innocent victim as best I could tell. There wasn't any student-teacher seduction, in either direction, in the movie if I remember.